JONES, ELIZA [JONES, MRS C] (b Edmonton, Middlesex, 29 November 1789; d York Town, Surrey, 28 February 1866)

This chapter presents a biography of mid- to late-19th-century singer Eliza Jones. The name of Mrs C Jones featured prominently on London playbills for a quarter of a century, in all types of works - comic, melodramatic, musical, burlesque, pantomime - and even in opera - but mostly in one type of role. She married, seemingly around 1818, a young small-part actor by name Charles William Jones who was eleven years her junior and, it seems, still in his teens. After a career of thirty years, Eliza - playing the Marchioness in The Daughter of the Regiment, Teresa in La sonnambula and Mrs Peachum to the last - seems to have gone into retirement in 1848, and the couple retired to York Town, where they lived out their last years. The 1861 census shows Charles William Jones, aged 61, living in South Side, York Town, with his wife Eliza, aged 72.